A boy lived inside of a flower.
She kept him warm.
She kept him safe.
To the outside world she was ugly, thorny, and missing a few petals, slowly decaying from old age but to the boy she was home. She was beautiful because he had never seen better.
One day, he looked through an opening where a petal had fallen and saw that he was surrounded by flowers much more beautiful than his ugly, thorny, decaying flower.
He said goodbye and left in search of greener pastures.
He soon found that all the other flowers were vain, rude, and not quiet right. He decided to go back to his ugly flower but when he arrived at the spot where she once flourished, he found that she was long gone. The only thing left of her was the decaying corpse of a rose.
She had perished of loneliness and old age. Even then she did not once stop believing she was beautiful.
A boy's opinion mattered not to her.
And so the boy mourned her death. He searched far and wide for another like her but never again did he find a flower quite as brilliant.
He too began to realize that she had been the most beautiful flower of them all....
The boy faded away, hunger and cold eating away at his life for he no longer had the protection of his flower's petals or the pollen she fed him.
If it was possible to die from regret, he would have died sooner.
